A method of providing a customer support or a network support is well known in a telecommunication domain. The method typically includes utilizing a knowledge management for diagnosing trouble or problem in the customer support and a network management system for diagnosing problem in the network support. The usage of the knowledge model for diagnosing the customer problem may be done either by a customer support representative (CSR) or by an agent or technicians. Similarly, the usage of the network management system for diagnosing the network problem may be done either by the agent or the technicians. Predominantly, the method includes an analysis the technicians performs in trouble diagnosis and propagating at least one or more diagnosis test results or solutions either through a CSR to the customer or through the network monitoring group to the network. The use of the proven solutions for resolving the trouble either faced by the customer or in the network uses some sophisticated techniques by the technicians. The techniques may include at least one of a CASE based reasoning or Bayesian networks or Rule based correlation or reasoning or combinations thereof.
However, the method used to resolve trouble faced either by the customer or in the network requires particular expertise of the agents and may even take a lot of time to isolate. If the problem is not apparent from the outset, the technicians may narrow down the problem space by a process of elimination by running the various diagnosis tests, which may again consume lot of time and money to resolve the problem. Also, the techniques used in the conventional methods require lot of expertise of the technicians and hence involves people dependencies in resolving the problem.
Often, the techniques used by the agents or technicians either in the customer support or in the network support for resolving the problem are disparate. Moreover, the network support and the customer support does not share any knowledge, though at times both needs to solve the same kind of problem expressed in different ways, which makes the process of resolving the problem a very inflexible and context neutral.
The conventional method includes capturing a best practice(s) of troubleshooting by a most experienced engineer(s) during initial phases of the service/product rollout and refining the best practices by a Level 1 operations staff in further phases. Thus, the conventional process may have higher lead time for the customer support operations or the network support operations to be ready for the service support on the new service.
Thus, there is a need for a method for a knowledge model, which may be used easily to resolve the customer problems in a timely and cost effective manner and to improve the readiness of the customer support operations, for a new service.